Psychoanalysis is
developed by Sigmund Freud beginning in the 1890s as a method of treating
patients with psychological problems. Although contemporary psychology has
largely rejected Freudian methods as unscientific (just ask Dr. Bailey),
psychoanalysis gained new life in the middle part of the 20th century
as a tool for cultural criticism.

Repression and Monsters

This makes sense for a
number of reasons. Much of the criticism of Freud comes from his evidence. He
builds his theories based on analytic sessions with patients, but also from
mythology, religious ritual, art, drama, literature and history (Freud, 1961
[1930]; Gay, 1989). He builds a theory of the mind based on cultural evidence.
Perhaps his theories are better suited to the fields from which he draws
evidence. Perhaps he is a keen observer of cultural process. His foundational
text in establishing psychoanalysis is his mammoth The Interpretation
of Dreams (1965 [1901]). His central thesis is that dreams are the
fulfillment of wishes. This makes sense for good dreams. But in explaining how
bad dreams can also be things we wish for, he outlines the process central to all
psychoanalysis, and in so doing, he gives us a glimpse
as to how and why we should use his ideas for popular culture analysis:

We may therefore suppose
that dreams are given their shape in individual human beings by the operation
of two psychical forces . . . and that one of these forces constructs the wish
which is expressed by the dream, while the other exercises a censorship upon
this dream-wish and, by the use of that censorship, forcible brings about a
distortion in the expression of the wish. (p. 177)

We don’t experience our wishes simply, because
parts of our minds get in the way. This is exactly the experience of
entertainment. There are things we wish for (happy endings), horrible things we
wouldn’t want but we seem to like watching on the screen (the Saw movies,
for example), and a variety of strange things that are hard to explain.

For Freud, we are creatures of desire, a part of us he
calls the id. But the id wants
animalistic things like food, sex, violence and various pleasures. And we all
grow up in a society that teaches us morality which forbids some of that. This
becomes the superego, the voice of
the moral order. That superego tries to repress those “sinful” desires. The
other part of our self is the ego,
or the rational seat of our self concept. It must
decide actions based on weighing desire versus morality and make other judgments
about things like what is feasible, affordable or what we can get away with. As
a result of all of these processes, various desires we have are repressed into
the unconscious, or the “place”
where all of the memories and ideas we have that we are not currently aware of
exist. (http://www.thomas-n-ruth.com/addiction_and_recovery/structural-iceberg.png)

So,
moving back to dreams, where unconscious processes can take place, given that
our willful consciousness is asleep, sinful desires that we wish for are
transformed into symbols in order to get by the superego. This way we can wish
for things that we “shouldn’t” wish for. And in the midst of “good” wishes, the
repressed will rise up as, perhaps, a monster. As to the other process, the
monster, what Robin Wood (1984) calls “the return of the repressed” (p. 173),
comes out in the collective nightmares of horror movies and scary moments in
other films. For Carol Clover (1992), the monsters in horror films represent
all sorts of fears and issues, from gender identity to religious doubt to
existential angst. In Jancovich’s (1996) study of 1950s
monster movies, fears of nuclear war transmuted into giant radioactive lizards
and insects. The unspeakable can only become speakable
when it transforms. Hippies (The Last House on the Left) and babies
(It’s Alive) kill us in the 1970s, family kills us in the 1980s (The
Stepfather), etc.

Whether or not any of
this happens in “real” dreams and people, both processes seem to happen in
popular culture. And what is popular culture other than a theater of our
dreams?

This cover image of a
horror comic shows some of the importance of these ideas. First, horror
filmmakers and directors like Hitchcock incorporated a variety of different
psychoanalytic concepts into their films on the 1930s and 1940s very
explicitly, so at a very simple level, the influence of this cannot be simply
ignored. At a deeper level, there are many emotive genres of storytelling where
questions of the repressed and the emergence of those repressed desires are key. Hitchcock’s Spellbound
and Psycho and Vertigo and Marnie articulate this rather
pedantically.

Many horror tales have
monsters which are a version of repressed desire coming to the surface:

She is immortal and
lonely. But whenever she finally has sex with someone, she can’t stop herself
from killing them, which almost happened to Edward in Breaking Dawn.

Here is what happens to
Simone Simon’s character in Cat People when
she feels romantic:

It’s not always this
simple, though (didn’t you just know I was going to say that?)

Displacement

In a horror movie the
repressed bursts, uncontrolled, because the fictional world allows for it. This
is not always the case. In dreams or popular culture where there is still an
operative morality that would prevent it, the repressed returns in a different,
more hidden form. This symbolic slippage where desires show up in other forms,
which Freud (1965 [1901]) calls displacement, shows up in a variety
of ways. Most commonly we end up looking for representations of sexuality or
violence that are hidden or obscured. These are fetishes, or
objects that stand in for something which our superegos repress. In a Hollywood
and television system filled with censorship, we can see this happen rather
deliberately, but it happens unconsciously on the part of producers, as well.

Here’s some oral
fixation moments from To Have and Have
Not::

And then there’s this
from North by Northwest:

In this case, the
cigarette stands in for sex. There are plenty of other ways sex is displaced
onto other forms. The prevalence of the phallic symbol in censored media when
characters are not allowed to act on their desires is common.

Here’s North by Northwest again:

And others:

The phallic symbol as
not just as a sexual symbol but as related to the dominance and power that can
be associated with traditional male sexuality is also common. Just as Slim
Pickens’ character as he rides the nuke in Doctor
Strangelove:

Wonder Woman,
particularly, has to deal with this waaay more that
Superman:

That power is often
translated into violence. When women are killed in horror films, almost always
by a penetrating knife, the sounds they make are more akin to the sounds of
desire in a porno flick than actual screams of pain and horror. And in many
porno flicks, the sex is violent and dehumanizing and not entirely about sexual
pleasure as much as it is about power and violence. This slippage is possible
because both are repressed into the cauldron of the unconscious. It is also
possible because of the working of the primal scene, which, for
Freud, is the moment of seeing someone (often your parents) having sex for the
first time. It is confusing, often glimpsed or heard with barriers to
perception (through a keyhole, heard from across the house, etc.). It is often
not possible in those stressful moments to know what is happening. And if sex
is a new concept, perhaps the only way to first make sense of it is with
notions of violence (“They are wrestling” and “I didn’t want him to hurt my
mom” are two experiences students have shared in my classes).

In a film like Alien, the monster rapes people’s faces,
emerges in a monstrous pregnancy, grows into a giant phallic-headed demon,
where it stabs you with its extra erection:

And then, of course, we
have The Empire Strikes Back, where Luke loses his sword/hand under the
punishment of his father (He did kiss what we’ll later find out is his sister
earlier in the film. The superego, voice of the now dark father, must rule on
such things):

After this, Han, Luke’s
rival for Leia, after telling his beloved “I know” in response to “I love you”
(rudeness is sexy, right?) is encased in carbonite,
becoming a permanent erection just as Luke loses his (Later to become a space
monk in black, while Han can only be thawed/softened by the embrace of his
woman):

The vagina is
represented more complexly. Freud writes of patients who feared the vagina dentate,
a toothed vagina that would bite off penises. We have recent literal
exploration of that fear:

We also have a history
of toothed orifices that eat people, usually men, which may or may not bleed
without dying (as the terrible menstruation joke goes):

In Predator, a monster that lives in the bush and bleeds but doesn’t
die, in a film with three different jokes about vagina size (really!?), the
hero finally demasks the creature, which, in Predator 2, Danny Glover’s character
calls “pussyface”:

Or, in both versions of Return of the Jedi, the Sarlacc pit consumes men, where they are “slowly digested
over a thousand years.” Can you hear the bad jokes about marriage now?

Further difficulties
with the primal scene arise, though. Violence against women is so often portrayed as sexual. The knife quivers with
excitement before it stabs Drew Barrymore in Scream. And the iconography that links sex and violence is
prominent. This is not BDSM and 50 Shades
of Grey, either. This is something more, something, perhaps, worse:

When depressed Buffy
gives in to her passions for the literally soulless but somehow still cool
Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, their coupling takes place in a house they
destroy. Fighting merges with sex and they both collapse through floors, either
character potentially at risk of death:

In North by Northwest,
we have the following dialogue between the romantic leads:

There is more Freudian
sexual awkwardness to explore, like the Oedipal
complex, if you take COMM 373, but for now, let’s move on to . . .

The Uncanny

Freud’s idea of the uncanny is
the idea that some repressed fear, something which we experience as unfamiliar,
is both secretly familiar and seemingly old and primitive (Hutchings, 2004;
Wells, 2000). For Freud it almost seems as if this is a special sort of feeling
that comes from some degree of self-knowledge that the repressed is emerging,
and it feels like a long lost and very ancient and horrible thing. This is the
way memory works in texts like The Shining and many ghost
movies. It also seems to be a part of the idea of mental breakdown as a result
of horror, as in Lovecraft’s cthulu stories and the
old gothic novels.

Hutchings (2004)
connects this with “old” mythological monsters like mummies and vampires.
Something just doesn’t seem right about things when you feel this, and Wells
(2000) connects this with the figure of the doppelganger, or the double, a dark
figure of yourself that appears in films like The Dark Half or
in Poe’s story “William Wilson.” That figure may be a kind of quasi-conscious
figure of the unconscious.

It is as if the uncanny
is a kind of shivering awareness of the repressed returning. It’s you, but it’s
also not. That divide is kind of like the divide between the imagined world,
the world or fears and hopes, and the “real” world of daily life. Surrealist
painters played on this feeling, as with De Chirico Mystery and Melancholy of a Street and Dali’s My Wife, Nude, Contemplating her own Flesh Becoming Stairs, Three
Vertebrae of a Column, Sky and Architecture:

Sometimes the uncanny
seems like things that scare us because they are both familiar and not. So
perhaps this is why we are afraid of clowns, dolls, marionettes, etc:

There is the innocence
we are supposed to see on the surface and what may or may not be lurking
underneath. Films like The Ring or The Grudge, where something as simply as a video cassette or a cell phone can curse you
are examples. The film where this is explored most fully is in Poltergeist, where a simple suburban
home has evil lurking underneath, where things like your toys, televisions,
trees and plates of leftover chicken legs can all be conduits of evil:

At a simple level, this
idea is in popular discourse as the “uncanny
valley” of digitally animated humans. It is the same question of how the
familiar and unfamiliar cue each other. We are reminded of the structures of
repression and displacement. And it disquiets us. It is as if we don’t really
know ourselves or what we are capable of. It’s why most gothic era ghosts
stories ended, not in death, but in insanity.

The Abject

Julia Kristeva’s (1982) idea of the “abject” is a
furthering of this. If the uncanny is a process that reminds of us the frailty
of our sense of self, if it reminds us that the illusion of your “self” as a
whole person is an illusion, the abject is a sometimes parallel crisis of the
body.

The abject is a visceral
rejection and disgust of things that emphasize the body and the borders, edges
and chaos possible for the body. For Kristeva, we
develop our self, which is kind of an illusion, by gathering forces of
“non-self” and expunging them. Gore, zombies, and films like The Fly,
where Jeff Goldblum is merged with an insect in a
scientific accident, emphasize this. Of course, these things are still often
desired, just as the uncanny are desired in clown horror movies. We want and
need these kids of monsters. Perhaps popular culture helps us work through
anxieties we already have. Perhaps desire for this stuff is some kind of
displacement. But we seem to want it:

The key things to take
away from psychoanalysis are the mechanisms of repression and displacement and
the thematics of sex, violence, death and fear. Any
and all of these anxieties and desires can commingle, especially in genres,
like horror, where the difference between anxiety and pleasure is, as perhaps
in dreams, not always clear.